16.10 configure Invocation

configure recognizes the following options to control how it
operates.

‘--help’

‘-h’

Print a summary of all of the options to configure, and exit.

‘--help=short’

‘--help=recursive’

Print a summary of the options unique to this package’s
configure, and exit. The short variant lists options
used only in the top level, while the recursive variant lists
options also present in any nested packages.

‘--version’

‘-V’

Print the version of Autoconf used to generate the configure
script, and exit.

‘--cache-file=file’

Enable the cache: use and save the results of the tests in file,
traditionally ‘config.cache’. file defaults to
‘/dev/null’ to disable caching.

‘--config-cache’

‘-C’

Alias for ‘--cache-file=config.cache’.

‘--quiet’

‘--silent’

‘-q’

Do not print messages saying which checks are being made. To suppress
all normal output, redirect it to ‘/dev/null’ (any error messages
will still be shown).

‘--srcdir=dir’

Look for the package’s source code in directory dir. Usually
configure can determine that directory automatically.

‘--prefix=dir’

Use dir as the installation prefix. Installation Names
for more details, including other options available for fine-tuning
the installation locations.

‘--no-create’

‘-n’

Run the configure checks, but stop before creating any output files.

configure also accepts some other, not widely useful, options.
Run ‘configure --help’ for more details.